The Monkey

In the ’70s and early ’80s, perhaps the only thing that Stephen King liked more than a child with a psychic gift/curse (Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter) was an inanimate object that becomes possessed by evil. A car, HGVs and even a laundry press lurched into life to wreak destruction, and all of these mechanical menaces made their inexorable way from page to screen, directed by John Carpenter (Christine), King himself (Maximum Overdrive, based on short story ‘Trucks’) and Tobe Hooper (The Mangler).

The Monkey, first published by Gallery magazine in 1980 and revised to feature in King’s 1985 collection of short stories Skeleton Crew, located genuine revulsion and terror in a wind-up toy. Eyes shining with “idiot glee” and lips pulled back in a “carnivorous” grin, the hirsute curio shuddered to life to clap its cymbals… and Death danced. The monkey was, in short, evil incarnate.

The main sustenance is course after course of ketchup-covered set-pieces...

So who better to adapt the chilling tale than Osgood Perkins, whose 2024 breakout hit Longlegs, like King’s The Monkey, is drenched in dread? Longlegs featured occult dolls and investigated pure evil; the monkey, in this film, is described as “basically the Devil”. And if Perkins can wring soul-shuddering scares out of Nicolas Cage playing a demonic serial killer who’s as much Botoxed grandma as Mansons Charles and Marilyn, then making a wind-up plaything scary should be child’s play.

Only, Perkins has lobbed an intriguing curveball by turning The Monkey into a horror-comedy, the writer-director corralling a bunch of larger-than-life supporting players — including, in one scene, Elijah Wood — who might have wandered in from a Coens movie. But that’s just garnish. The main sustenance is course after course of ketchup-covered set-pieces that recall Peter Jackson’s Braindead or the last act of Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise in their gleeful nastiness, and the Final Destination movies in their Mousetrap-style, chain-of-calamity inventiveness. Shotgun, harpoon, hibachi knife, bowling ball, electrified swimming pool, lawnmower… all dish the splatstick. Ever wondered what it looks like when a stampede of wild horses gallops over a snoozing camper? “Cherry pie in a sleeping bag,” is how one bemused onlooker puts it.

Though Perkins has shifted the tone of the story and replaced those clashing cymbals with a snare drum for our Satanic simian to bang on, he’s maintained the core of the tale. Opening in 1999, Hal and his twin brother Bill (both played by Christian Convery) discover the monkey among the many knick-knacks their travelling father has collected over the years. It pounds its drum to the jingle-jangle of ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’ and the boys’ babysitter is decapitated in a freak accident. More drums, more splats. The boys try to be rid of the toy but, as King fans know, sometimes they come back. Cut to present day and Hal (Theo James) has seen neither his brother nor the monkey for many years. But all that is about to change.

There’s a hint of It to the structure of characters fighting an evil entity as both children and adults, while the story riffs on W.W. Jacobs’ famous 1902 tale The Monkey’s Paw, in which wishes come at an enormous price — here, young Hal experiments with winding up the monkey with a particular person in mind, only to learn, in the most terrible way, it doesn’t take requests. But the biggest influences on Perkins’ movie are surely the grisly EC Comics stories that King devoured as a kid, and paid homage to when penning Creepshow for pal George A. Romero. Is The Monkey as memorable as vignettes like 'The Crate', 'They’re Creeping Up On You' and Creepshow 2’s ‘The Raft’ (this last also based on a story in Skeleton Crew)? Perhaps not: the material is as stretched as the skin of that cursed snare drum, and Perkins opts to maintain the sombre palette and pristinely controlled framing that so distinguished Longlegs, when a looser style might have better served the crazed antics.

But it sure makes for a fun night at the movies. As Hal tells his young son Petey (Colin O’Brien), “Everybody dies, that’s life.” And sometimes the only way to deal with death is to laugh at it.